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Luke is at An Event Apart in Atlanta to give his presentation: It’s a Write/Read Mobile Web. He begins by showing us where he lives in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley. Facebook is up the road in Palo Alto. Yahoo is down the road in Sunnyvale, next to a landfill. In between, there’s a little company called AOL. Then there’s Google and YouTube just off Highway One.

So you have a bunch of internet companies in close physical proximity. They are also the top sites in the US when it comes to time spent on the web, by a very wide margin. You would think that the similarities would end there, because they all provide very different services: social networking, email, messaging, search, and video. But they have something in common. They are all write/read experience. They don’t work unless people contribute content to them. You post updates, you send emails, you type in searches, you upload videos.

Tim Berners-Lee said that his original vision for the web was a place where we could all meet and read and write.

This isn’t just a US-centric thing. Looking at the worldwide list of most popular sites, you’ve got the ones mentioned already but also Twitter and Wikipedia, where all the content is contributed by their users. Even Amazon is powered by reviews. This is what makes the web so awesome. It’s not a broadcast medium. It’s a two-way street. It’s interactive.

So what’s the biggest factor that’s changing for all of these sites? Mobile. 67% of Facebook users and 60% of Twitter users are on mobile. If you look at the stats for Facebook, you can see that their growth is coming from mobile. Desktop usage is pretty flat: mobile usage is soaring. Facebook also has a growing segment of mobile-only users. Zuck has defined Facebook now as a mobile company.

When people hear about the growth in mobile, they assume it’s all about content consumption: reading status updates, watching videos, and so on. There’s a myth that small devices are not good for content creation. But if that were true, then wouldn’t that be a huge problem, given the statistics for growth? Facebook and Twitter would have almost no content. But it’s simply not true. Three hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every second from mobile devices.

People think that mobile devices are for games, social networking, and entertainment. And it’s true that those are popular activities. But that kind of usage is actually going down. Where is that time going? The fastest growing category is utilities: finding and buying things, financial management, health services, travel planning, etc. Basically, mobile is anything. So if mobile hasn’t effected you yet, it will.

How do we think about this write/read experience? We imagine that 100% of people are consumers: reading, browsing, etc. Then 10% are curators: liking, faving, etc. Finally there’s the 1% that actually create stuff. 1.8% of users provide almost all of Wikipedia’s content. So we naturally focus on the content consumption in our designs, because that’s the biggest number. But Luke thinks it makes sense to flip that on its head. That 1% are your most important users.

Facebook redesigned their content creation flow multiple times, trying to make that “write” experience as good as possible. Same with YouTube’s uploading interface. They both focused relentlessly on the content creation.

So as we shift our attention to mobile, we should be asking: how do we design for mobile creation?

1. One-handed use

Like Luke’s old adage about “one thumb, one eyeball”, this is literally about testing content creation with one thumb. For his startup, Polar, Luke tested the interface with one thumb and timed how long it took. It was tested and designed for a thumb.

“But Luke”, you cry, “Not everyone just uses their thumb on their mobile device screens!” Well, observing 1,333 people using mobiles on the street showed that they pretty much do.

Dan Formosa says we should design for extremes. In Objectified he talked about designing garden shears for someone with arthritis. If it works for that user, it will work well for everyone.

“But Luke”, you cry, “Aren’t you falling prey to the myth of the ‘mobile context’ where the user is in a hurry, using just one hand?” Well, it is true that lots of people use their devices in the home. But even when you’re not out on the street, you’re still using your thumb: using your phone while watching TV.

Focusing on this use case means you can rethink a lot of interactions. As a general principle, Luke advises “don’t let the keyboard come up.” That is, only provide a virtual keyboard as a last resort. Use smart defaults. Let people tap on links or checkboxes instead of typing. If the user needs to enter a location, they could do so by tapping on a map instead of typing in a place name. Provide a date-picker instead of making people type out dates. Let people use sliders for setting values.

When you design for one-handed use, you’re designing for an extreme case. It also forces you to challenge your assumptions.

2. Visually engaging

When you aim to avoid the keyboard, you often come up with more visual solutions, which can be a great opportunity.

Take Snapchat. People express themselves through photos. The Line app is chat, but with a huge amount of emoticons. Chat becomes visual.

The lesson here is not that society is collapsing into sexting, but that images are very powerful on mobile.

Hotel Tonight’s mobile experience is based around big beautiful images.

“But Luke”, you cry “Why are you advocating big images? Isn’t performance the most important thing on mobile?” Well, yes. But instead of just abandoning images, let’s get really creative about how we serve up images. Take, for example, the experimentation around increasing image dimensions while reducing quality, which results in much smaller files with no noticable loss of fidelity.

3. Focused flows

Dwelling on one-handed use and visually engaging imagery are techniques you can use, but you should really focus on simplifying the processes you put people through. Foursquare have drastically simplified their check-in process.

Creativity is all about focusing on something until you find the simplest way to do it.

The Boingo wireless service used to require 23 inputs. They got rid of 11 of them and increased conversion by 34%. That’s great, but they didn’t go far enough. You can always simplify even more.

Hotel Tonight got their flow down to three taps and a swipe. The CEO says that’s a competitive advantage. Just compare how long it takes to book a hotel with their competitors.

It takes big changes to go small.

When taking about forms and input, this might seem like standard design advice: focus and simplify. But keep focusing and simplifying even more.

4. Just-in-time actions

So we’ve seen three different ways to make things simpler, faster, and more focused. But isn’t that really hard on a small screen, with so little real estate?

Instead of providing intro tours (which are more like intro tests), why not provide introductory information only when it’s needed? Apply the same approach to actions. On Polar, there’s an option to hide the keyboard, but that action is only visible when the keyboard appears.

On long pages on Polar, people wanted a way to get back to the top. If you start scrolling upwards, the navbar from the top is overlaid. It detects that you might be trying to get back to the top, and provides the actions you want.

5. Cross-device usage

Everything Luke has talked about so far has been specifically focused on one kind of device: mobile. But we need to keep our eyes on the multi-device write/read web that is emerging. Creation is happening across devices …sequentially and simultaneously.

The simplest example is access. If you’re on a desktop browsing Luke’s site on Chrome, and then you move to Chrome on the iPhone, there’s Luke’s site.

The next cross-device pattern is flow. We want our processes to work across devices. So if I’m on my laptop and I do a search, then I pick up my phone, I want that last input to carry over. On Ebay, you can save a draft listing on the desktop and pick it up later on mobile. On Google Drive, editing is synced simultaneously between all your devices.

Control is another pattern: using one device to tell another device what to do.

Luke hates log-in forms; that’s no secret. Five years ago, he worked on Yahoo Projector which used a scanned barcode to take control of a TV screen with a phone. He wanted to use this to replace log in, but that never happened. But there’s a service called OneID which is tackling the same use case: you can control log-in across devices.

The last example of cross-device usage is push. Going back to that draft listing on Ebay: take a picture on your phone and have that picture show up on the desktop browser view.

People talk about mobile versus desktop, but these are all examples of these different devices working together.

Luke begins with some audience interactivity. We’ve all got to stand up. Now we learn a few small moves. Put them all together and what have you got? The Thriller dance!

There’s a point to this: his talk is called Mobile Web Design Moves. Small moves can add up to very big things.

But why learn new moves? Well, Mobile changes things:

Mobile web growth and

Mobile is different.

Mobile web growth

A few years ago, Morgan Stanley published a report in which they predicted that somewhere in 2012 more mobile devices would be shipped than PCs. Well, it happened two years earlier than predicted. As Eric Schmitt has said, everything to do with mobile happens faster. There’s been a 20% drop in PC usage, with the slack taken up by tablets and smartphones. But as Luke points out, the term PC—Personal Computer—is actually better suited to a mobile device; the device you have with you on your person. The way we interact online, email, etc., is shifting to mobile devices.

But is all this usage happening in native apps? No, as it turns out. 40% of Twitter’s traffic comes from mobile, of which 78% is from the mobile website. Mobile browser users increased over 300%. What people forget is that growth of native apps also drives growth of mobile web use.

In a nutshell, more people are going to be accessing your websites with a mobile device than with a desktop device. Find one study of mobile usage that doesn’t show exponential growth.

Even if you have native apps, like Gowalla with a client for iOS, Android, Blackbery, etc., people will still post links in your native app and where does that take you? To a browser.

Anyway, it doesn’t have to be either a native app or a mobile web site. You can hedge your bets and do both …so you’re protected if Steve Jobs pulls the rug out from under you.

Mobile is different

When you’re sitting at a computer at home, you’re sitting comfortably with a keyboard, mouse, chair and coffee mug. The mobile experience involves a small screen, short battery life, an inconsistent network, fingers and sensors. This tactile experience makes it intensely personal.

Where do people use these devices? There’s the sterotypical picture of the businessman on the move, walking down the street. But 84% of mobile usage happens at home; watching TV, for example. 74% of people use them standing in line. People use them in the toilet.

What about when people use these devices? All throughout the day, as it happens. That’s quite different to desktop use. iPad users do a lot of reading on the couch in the evening and in bed at night.

Mobile devices have different technical capabilities and limitations and there are also some distinct times and behaviours associated with their usage.

By now you should be convinced: I need new moves!

Organise yourself

Try to understand why someone would pull out their mobile device. What is that device good at? Try to marry that up with your content. Luke breaks down mobile behaviours into these categories:

Lookup/Find — usually location-related.

Explore/Play — often related to reading.

Check in/Status

Edit/Create — email, for example.

Think about organising your structure to fit these tasks. Luke shows a college site that prioritises campus information less than marketing fluff. But you know, this isn’t just about mobile users. That useful information—like a campus map—is useful for everyone, regardless of their device. So if you go through this process of prioritising for mobile, you will also be prioritising for desktop.

Mobile forces you to prioritise. Screen space is tight. Attention is short. Apply the same prioritisation to desktop users.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: content first, navigation second. Give people what they’re looking for first.

Don’t try to port all of your content to mobile. Instead use this as an opportunity to prune your content and get rid of the crap that people aren’t interested in.

What people want to do on mobile is the same as what people want to do on the desktop. For some reason, Yelp only allowed mobile users to point “mini” reviews …at the very time when people are in the place they are reviewing!

Don’t dumb it down for mobile.

Use your head

Content first, navigation second; yes, but navigation is still important. Facebook’s mobile version originally had 13 navigation elements, which is a bit much. YouTube puts the navigation on a different screen. The pro is that this saves screen estate. The con is that you lose context. ESPN’s mobile site has a navigation that you pull down. There’s also navigation at the end of the page. That’s better than what YouTube does: when you get to the end of the page on YouTube, it’s a dead end. One of the challenges with the ESPN site is that the navigation is duplicated (the pull-down nav and the footer nav). A potential solution is to have that nav link at the top point to the navigation at the bottom of the page.

What about fixed position menus? The iPhone has permanent software buttons on screen in the browser, right? But to do fixed positioning on mobile you have to use some hacky JavScript. And even if you get it working, it’s eating up valuable screen real estate. On the Android device, there’s the problem of the proximity to hardware buttons: people will accidentally mis-tap the hardware controls trying to use on-screen navigation anchored to the bottom of the screen.

So don’t just slavishly copy iOS conventions. Don’t put a back button in your site. It makes sense in an app but on a website, the browser provides a back button already.

Take it in

Input is interesting topic on mobile. The traditional advice is to avoid text input on mobile ….and yet billions of text messages are sent every day. So let’s reverse the traditional advice. Let’s encourage people to input on mobile.

The workhorses of input on the web have been checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, etc. Using these standards on mobile means you can type into the device interface features, like the select UI on the iPhone. But the constraints of the smaller screen on a mobile device introduces some challenges even if you use these standard controls. If you make your own interface elements, you can given them touch target sizes.

The stuff that we have to programme for ourselves today will become standard declarative features in the future. That’s already happening with HTML5 input types like date. But even small things can make a big difference. Use input types like url, number, email, etc. to get an appropriate on-screen keyboard on iOS. Make use of new input types and attributes. Every little bit helps.

Input masks—confining what’s allowed in a form field—can be very useful on mobile devices. Right now we have to do it programmatically but again, it should become declarative in the future.

Avoid the gradual reveal, where you format as people are typing but in a different format to what the placeholder text displayed. Beware with placeholder text: people can interpret it as the form field already being filled in. Phrase them as questions if you can.

There’s a lot of really exciting things happening on the input side of things with mobile devices. More and more device APIs and sensors are being exposed.

Ask for it

Input is the way we gather answers from people but we also have to think about how we ask the questions.

Many mobile browsers try to optimise desktop-specific sites to help mobile users by using zoom. In that situation, right-aligned form field labels are problematic: when you zoom in on the form field, you can’t see the label. Top-aligned labels work better …and there are many other advantages to top-aligned labels that Luke has talked about in the past.

Some people are trying to use placeholder text as labels. But the problem there is that as soon as you tap in there, it disappears. Again, watch out when putting labels within input fields: it’s not clear if the form field is already filled in or not.

Make your moves

Here’s an opportunity. Mobile is growing so quickly and it’s all new. Now is our chance to come up with new innovative stuff. This stuff hasn’t been figured out yet. More and more devices are coming online every day and they’ve all got web browsers.

We can push towards natural user interfaces where the content is the user interface. Minor rant: our design processes are more about designing navigation instead of focusing on the content and designing that. It’s a challenge. As Josh Clark put it:

Buttons are a hack.

So make your own moves. Yes, it’s a scary time; there’s so much to learn about, but also also a huge opportunity.

Keep an eye out for Luke’s book from A Book Apart called Mobile First coming out in Summer 2011.